


anchor

by tanyart



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:22:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23792290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanyart/pseuds/tanyart
Summary: Praedyth reunites with Pahanin under strange circumstances.(Written for #vogboysweek! Day 4: Tether.)
Relationships: Pahanin/Praedyth (Destiny)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 24
Collections: Works about the Vault of Glass Fireteam





	anchor

Praedyth dreams of Pahanin’s hands.

They sweep down his sides, fingers confident and familiar. His palms press against Praedyth, and it’s nothing hungry or seeking — just a casual touch of his gloves, but Praedyth can feel it’s intimacy. Pahanin pushes, and Praedyth doesn’t notice how hard he is pressing until there’s a click, then a hard snap.

Praedyth feels a tug, strangely disconnected, and then he upchucks an empty magazine onto the ground.

Praedyth screams. Above him, he hears Pahanin scream as well.

Pahanin jerks him upright — _upright?_ — and Praedyth goes swinging, pointing — _pointing?_ — to the sky. “What the hell? SGA, was that _you_?”

“You turned me into a _gun?_ ” Praedyth starts yelling, sputtering — and then stops sputtering when he realizes that bullets are coming out of him when he does.

“Oh, nuts. This can’t be good,” Pahanin mutters. He gives Praedyth a reassuring pat on the… the barrel? Praedyth thinks it’s his barrel. He twirls over Pahanin’s shoulder, but not by choice. Pahanin’s got him strapped behind his back now, cloak flapping in the wind as he hops upwards. “Hang on, I’m taking fire. Stop screaming, the Vex will be all over us. Do you want that, SGA? _Do you?_ ”

SGA? Praedyth pauses. He doesn’t know that acronym. Synthetic Genetic Array? Standard Galactic Alphabet? Even with context clues it doesn’t make sense, and right now Praedyth is surely lacking context. He looks at himself — not that he has eyes, but he has vision, somehow, and he’s suddenly aware of all his parts; a trigger, three barrels, a cocking cam, and a rotor...

“A machine gun? I’m a _machine gun_?” Praedyth starts hollering all over again, and he keeps hollering as Pahanin finishes off the wave of Vex.

“SGA, what’s the matter with you? Of course you’re a machine gun! You’ve _been_ a machine gun!”

“No!” It’s not in Praedyth’s habit to wail in complete denial, but this is a forgivable circumstance. He has been non-existent for an unknown about of time. Sudden existence as a gun is like being dropped into a bucket of ice water. It doesn’t matter if Praedyth is out of the Vault; his only emotion is confused and upset. “You did _not._ ”

“I built you! With my own two hands! I think I would know if I built a machine gun or not! Alright hold up.” The gunfire tapers off. Pahanin heaves a sigh. “Okay. I think that’s the last of ‘em.”

The world tilts. Praedyth feels himself turn around in Pahanin’s grip. He stops long enough to see Pahanin’s worried eyes, tinted behind a dark visor. If Praedyth had the ability to catch his breath, it would’ve fallen all over the place. Hearing Pahanin’s voice is different from _seeing_ Pahanin himself, alive and whole and standing close enough to touch.

It’s been a very long time. He feels this, as timeless as it is in the Vault of Glass. Praedyth wants to punch that face as much as he wants to kiss it, but he doesn’t have the hands to hold Pahanin’s cheeks when all his instincts scream at him to reach out.

“I can’t believe you turned me into gun,” he says in lieu of having a teary breakdown. For the first time he notices he voice has a tinny quality to it, a robotic ring like speaking through a bad frequency. “You couldn’t have put me in a frame or something?”

“Are you… are you having an existential crisis?” Pahanin asks, bewildered. “Dang, I knew I should’ve installed a restart button. I didn’t give you any philosophical upgrades, did I?”

“No? Pahanin! What’s going on?” Praedyth ask, finally calm enough to take in their surroundings. The air is heavy and damp. Everything is green except for the river of red iron. They are on Venus, near the Ishtar Library.

And Pahanin… Pahanin’s alive. Maybe he had managed to fix things, in his own way.

“Sorry for yelling,” Praedyth adds hastily. Guiltily. “I got… startled.”

“You sure as heck did. You alright?” Pahanin’s helmet goes still, reading his HUD. No doubt doing a scan of Praedyth. “Damn. I must’ve bungled the AI settings.”

“Pahanin,” Praedyth says, and feels as if the words are hard to get out, which is stupid. No vocal cords to seize on, no throat to close up. “It’s me. Praedyth.”

Pahanin’s helmet tilts, not understanding, and if Praedyth had a heart it would’ve fell straight to the ground. He’s surprised another roll of bullets didn’t pop out of him.

“You don’t remember.” Of course.

“Sorry. I did buy your AI system secondhand. Was Praedyth your previous designation?”

Praedyth doesn’t answer. He feels angry at himself for not realizing. The Vault of Glass has scrubbed him clear of all the timelines that matter most to him. He had known this. He had looked at Pahanin and fell straight into hope.

Pahanin shifts. “I’m sorry,” he says, hands tightening, no longer intimate and familiar; it is what it is — a cautious grip over a faulty weapon. “Let’s get you fixed.”

Praedyth can’t bring himself to protest. “Alright.”

* * *

“Tell me about myself,” Praedyth says, staring up at the ceiling of Pahanin’s ship.

“I built you,” replies Pahanin, pride in his voice and just a bit of smugness in his eyes. He bends over Praedyth, headlight shining at his shoulder. A screwdriver spins between his fingers. “For…” he pauses and then grins, “ _Super Good Advice_.”

“...SGA. I see.” Praedyth lays in parts on a table. The computer component of his newly hardwired self is still intact and running. He wonders why Pahanin hasn’t turned it off. He’s glad though. It’s nice to see Pahanin’s grin. “I assume SGA has been doing it’s job until this malfunction?”

“Definitely. Whether or not I follow its advice is up for debate though,” Pahanin says with a laugh. He fiddles around with Praedyth’s — or, well, SGA’s motherboard. Pokes here and there. Praedyth doesn’t feel anything much but Pahanin seems to be dissatisfied with what he sees. “Shoot. I gave you… damn. I guess I did make you to give me advice, with an emphasis on sarcasm. Maybe the situational awareness settings crossed into phenomenology on accident.”

Praedyth snorts.

“Sense of humor is still intact, I see,” Pahanin says, wry. He waves a hand and a projection flashes across the space between them. SGA’s schematics pop up and -

Praedyth lets out a bark of laughter.

“Solar,” he says, torn between mirth and bitterness, “You made SGA a solar weapon.”

“Well, yeah?” Pahanin squints at the projection. He makes a few calculations that Praedyth might’ve been able to help with, if Pahanin hadn’t added, “Always did have a fondness for Solar types.”

Praedyth’s lucky he’s already been made red with a shader. Maybe Pahanin would feel his rotor heat up or something.

“The Vex use Void shields,” he eventually says, a criticism to make up for his pause.

“Ugh. You and your advice again,” Pahanin sighs. “Which, by the way, I’m not going to follow.”

“Always knew you liked being contrary.”

Pahanin prods at one of Praedyth’s circuit boards, taking out a soldering kit as he does. A flicker of Void lights up the tip of the wick. “It’s not that I’m contrary. I’m pretty easygoing. I just like the conversation.”

“It’s not a conversation if you only speak to make a counterpoint,” Praedyth says, with the feeling that they might’ve spoken about this before, eons ago. Back when they have thought of each other as _that_ Warlock, or _that_ Hunter. “And use Arc if you’re going to solder that wire.”

Pahanin frowns. He can’t glare at Praedyth but his eyes seem to squint a little harder at Praedyth’s circuits. “Can’t use Arc that well. Had a guy on my fireteam who could help out with that.”

“Yes,” says Praedyth. “I know.”

“Do you?” Pahanin says, half-distracted, Void sparks flying over the table as he makes his fixes. “I know I’ve mentioned Kabr before. It’s one of the reasons why I built you. I don’t think I ever told you that, really. But I think you knew.”

Pahanin leans back. He runs another diagnostic test and, slowly, new memories start flooding back into Praedyth, like a back-up file being uploaded.

It’s strange. SGA had always been a gun, always knew it was a gun. It remembers Pahanin’s voice and his preferred settings, keeps a tally of the Vex they killed together, logs in bullet trajectories. All statistics a good, functional AI should keep. Then there are recordings of Pahanin talking to himself — talking to SGA — conversations about his writings or his books. Wry comments here and there.

Very occasionally, something about Kabr — a confused sentence or two about what could’ve been. It almost sounds wistful, but not quite. Pahanin can’t miss what he thinks he never had, but he knows that he is lonely.

And Praedyth knows these memories aren’t _his_. All those quiet admissions belong to SGA.

“I found it!” Pahanin crows suddenly. He gestures to the scan. “There was a glitch in your system. It happened while we were fighting the Vex. Dunno how they managed to infiltrate your programming.”

“Sorry. You miss SGA, don’t you?”

A crease forms over Pahanin’s brow. It takes a moment for him to answer, but eventually he shrugs. All those times he’s talked to SGA, this is almost no different. “Sounds stupid, but I programmed every detail of it. It’s voice. It’s personality. The way it talks to me. I made myself a friend that I’ve always known.”

Pahanin reprograms a set of glimmer into a new datachip. He holds it between his fingers, inspecting it before he glances down at Praedyth.

“You’re the gun I built. I’ve checked. There’s no new programming, no virus. You’re still SGA, but you sound so sad,” he says, fingers flitting over Praedyth, calm with the Void. “I want to fix that.”

Praedyth wonders how many times Pahanin has wiped an AI system clean when he made SGA. He wonders how many times Pahanin will do it again.

Quietly, almost to himself, Pahanin says, “I'd rather forget than be so sad.”

The datachip goes in, and Praedyth suddenly understands how Pahanin survived the Vault. Why he might’ve been the only one out of all three of them, against Kabr who constructed the terms of his own sacrifice, and Praedyth, who could never let go of all that he had.

But he’s always known Pahanin to be a master of the Void, knows when to cut his tethers loose and make new ones.

“You doing alright?” asks Pahanin, looking down.

“That’s _my_ line,” says Super Good Advice. “But since you asked; yeah, I’m doing just fine.”


End file.
